Many organisations conduct regular searches of patent and academic literature. The main motivations for conducting these searches is to watch the activities of their competitors and to better assess the strength of their own intellectual property. Some services exist that allow searches to be configured and updates automatically delivered vi email. At regular intervals each search produces a number of new documents that must be reviewed. Often multiple people from the organisation are responsible for reviewing a new document.
Systems exist to provide reviewers with the ability to access these documents and provide an indication of their review using a set of interfaces. However, as the number of searches, people and documents increase the ability to help ensure that the reviews are conducted in an ordered manner and is performed thoroughly becomes increasingly difficult.